A poor grade for lawmakers on child care

<B>Grading restaurants</B>

Health departments in dozens of counties across the state rate restaurants by using letter grades. In Orange County, the system is a bit different. A restaurant with a solid year of good inspections gets an "Award of Excellence" certificate owners can post in a front window. Poor inspections must be also posted. The past six inspection reports are also online. To check out restaurants at which you eat, go to www.ocfoodinfo.com and click on "inspection violations.

<B>Reach Kindy</B>

When you drop your kid off at child care, knowing how state inspectors grade the health and safety of the place should be as easy as spotting the rating certificate in the window of your favorite restaurant.

That was the simple idea behind a proposed law, AB617, that was killed Thursday by the state Legislature after heavy lobbying by the child-care industry and strong resistance from the state department that oversees child-care facilities.

The bill would have required the state to prominently display letter grades, or some other rating, at state-licensed child-care homes and centers. Dozens of counties in California do just this with restaurants, requiring the posting of a simple A-F grade in the entryway.

"There needs to be a way of red-flagging facilities with problems," said child-care bill author Assemblyman John Benoit, R-Riverside. "We are trying to improve transparency for parents."

Benoit will try to resurrect his bill in a few months after a requested report is completed by the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office. The bill was motivated by the drowning death of 20-month-old Aryanna Sanchez in a spa at a state-licensed Riverside child-care home. The facility received more than a dozen citations from the state from 1998 to 2004 for failing to childproof the spa.

An Orange County Register investigation in 2002 showed that child-care homes and centers that are cited repeatedly for serious safety violations are rarely shut down.

Parents can only learn of problems if they call the state and ask, or drive to a regional office to read inspection reports - Monday through Friday, between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., when most parents are working. Changing this has been nearly impossible.

And since 2002, the situation has worsened because the state now inspects child-care homes like Aryanna's less often - once every five years, instead of once every three. And the state is behind schedule.

So why did such a simple bill get killed?

In a year of extreme belt-tightening, departments that argue they are already stretched too thin are easily able to kill new mandates.

And on this, the child-care industry and the Department of Social Services have a point. Even with the reform, you'd have much better odds of finding useful information on Orange County restaurants than you would for child-care facilities.

Orange County restaurants get inspected three times a year, and reports are produced that are thicker and more detailed than state reports on child-care homes and centers. The difference is, in part, manpower. The ratio of county health inspectors is 1 for every 188 restaurants. For child-care homes, it's 1 to 300.

Still, if the state were as efficient with its staffing as the county, it could do inspections at least once a year. Produce and post letter grades. Then maybe you’d know if your child is in safe hands.

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